My project, Moving Experience, with team members Joshua Samuel Brown and Michele Siegel, started with a premise: We would not use cars during the immersion period. We wanted to examine if, indeed, the way you arrived at a story changed the way that you reported it. Or, perhaps, if getting there was the story.

We rented bikes, we bought Metro passes. We took video from our helmets and lugged radio equipment on the bus. We tweeted constantly and we never put away our cameras. What I’m most proud of is a massive Google map that we created documenting the distance that each of us traveled that week and the method of transportation we took. We also embedded some of our tweets onto the map, which served as a compendium of our in-the-field realizations.

Each morning, I took long short walks through downtown. What do I mean by that? I’d walk for a long time, but I didn’t cover a lot of ground, walking only a few blocks in the course of an hour. I was practicing my noticing. I looked at anything that grabbed my attention. I took a lot of photos. I was trying to slow down as much as possible, to read the sidewalks, to talk to people, to find stories underfoot.

We quickly realized a series of five truths when it came to covering culture, especially in Los Angeles. Big stories were getting overlooked. Transportation was a huge issue. The word “art” meant different things in different neighborhoods. All of the truths pointed to one reality: Instead of reporting faster, we needed to report slower:

Could we take a page from the Slow Food movement and propose a type of “Slow Journalism” that would be embraced worldwide: an experiential, contextual approach to covering art? A return to the idea of covering a beat—by walking, riding or busing—in order to unearth the cultural stories that are more relevant and valuable to our audiences.

And so our team’s final project calls for a different methodology for reporting—a new way of working. A movement, if you will. We call it Street Journalism. And here is our manifesto:

We will cover a beat—a physical neighborhood, a cultural community, a single city block.

We will walk, bike or take public transit as we report. We will limit our trips in cars.

We will meet the locals. We will ask them what we should be covering in their neighborhoods.

We will remember that the best story leads come from people, not computers.

We will report stories which acknowledge that art is about place, and culture is about context.

If you’re a journalist, we’re hoping you can join the movement. You can read more about the Moving Experience project to get even more insight into our process. Then I hope you’ll get out there and try it yourself. Use the hashtag #streetjourno to tag your stories, your quotes, or just your realizations. Show us what you learn when you hit the streets, slow down and pay attention. Even though I thought I was writing this way, I see now that I was still moving too fast to discover the stories all around me. I know I’ll never think of my work the same way again.

A huge thanks to everyone who met with us to talk about our project. All their names and organizations are listed on the right hand side of the Moving Experience page.

Love it (!) and have partly been doing my own street journalism, I think (but definitely was inspired by your blog). Unfortunately I don’t tweet … and it seems sans tweet more difficult to join the movement. But it won’t deter me, and perhaps even encourage me to start tweeting.

Alissa

Thanks so much! I think not tweeting is totally okay, as long as you share your work with a larger audience. But tweeting is fun, and a great way to share tiny snippets of your research on the fly. Thank you for commenting!

http://aletageorge.blogspot.com/ Aleta George

Awesome! My reaction to the speed of things has also been to slow it down. I pledge my support of street journalism and will keep the manifesto above me desk. Thank you for putting into concrete words what has been swirling around my brain as idea. Aleta George

Carren Jao

Amen to this movement! I’ve often wanted a career that somehow mirrors the pace of slow food. It’s one of the biggest reasons I became a writer–to enjoy and experience more of life! It’s great that I’m not the only one with such strange ideas! 😀 Go #streetjourno!

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